Wednesday, January 17, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Carole A. Barone Education Must 'Transform' Itself or Become Irrelevant, Educause Official Says By FLORENCE OLSEN Creating a course syllabus will be a different experience with the new approach to teaching and learning that Carole A. Barone now advocates. Two years ago, Ms. Barone was named vice president of Educause, a consortium of colleges and information-technology companies. Ms. Barone had been the associate vice chancellor for information technology at the University of California at Davis. Among Ms. Barone's responsibilities at Educause is the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative, which -- despite its name -- is an international program. Begun in 1994, its objective is to transform higher education through the extensive use of information technology. Its proponents envision using the technology to expand access to American higher education and enhance its quality, while reducing or containing teaching and learning costs. One possibility lies in using software components that are sometimes called "learning objects." These are software building blocks that can also include content. Professors will use them to create multimedia materials for courses that can be taught, in part or entirely, online. If traditional higher education does not transform itself, it risks losing market share and relevance in the rapidly emerging distributed-education "marketspace," Ms. Barone suggests. Q. What is the "infrastructure" in the National Learning Infrastructure Initiative? A. We use the term "infrastructure" in the broadest sense, because from the beginning we have recognized that it takes more than technology to enable academic transformation. We include, in addition to hardware, software, networking, and standards, such institutional foundations as policies and planning and budgeting strategies. The initiative is not about change at the margins. We are talking about an entirely new higher-education environment. Q. Can we really expect faculty members to become software developers and universities to support hundreds of course-software-development projects? A. I don't think the majority of faculty members want to be courseware developers. I think they want to be able to create their courses and put their personal stamp on them, because teaching is a very personal thing. Many campuses have installed course-management systems to provide a standard technical environment within which faculty members are able to customize their courses. With these systems, institutions can offer consistent support within the constraints of limited resources. The days of one-on-one support for faculty courseware-development efforts are waning. Q. Those systems basically automate much of the programming, and the faculty members more or less just put content in? A. Yes, the faculty members put content in, and then they are doing what faculty members have always done. Q. So that professors are using a new type of media to create their courses, but essentially still being professors? A. That's right. This approach also gets at some of the problems that faculty members have had in the past. They find a textbook that is two-thirds wonderful, and one-third of it they want to throw away. Well, now you can have exactly what you want. You just have to be able to go out there and find the components -- and have easy-to-use tools to put them together. And you need standards for interoperability -- so that different components work together. Q. Do you think universities would be promoting this sort of technology-based transformation were they not fearful of new, for-profit competitors changing the economics of higher education? A. I don't think universities have a choice. One of the things motivating faculty members to make these changes is the students. Even if you're a traditional tier-one institution, you're going to have students coming to your campus with expectations that they will do more than merely sit in the classroom and absorb. They are expecting to use online resources, and they come able to use them. The Internet is a social environment for many of these students, and they construct knowledge using fragments of knowledge that they find on the Web. They construct their knowledge socially using the Web. It's very different. So every institution is faced with at least that much change. And that in itself is transformational. Q. How are colleges handling the extra financial and personnel burdens of developing software-based teaching materials? A. I'd say they're still trying to do it with excess funds and on the fringes. That works when you're just dealing with the faculty members who were the pioneers, but it doesn't scale -- for all the rest of the faculty who now need to do it. Q. That is to say, there are no line items in university budgets for faculty-software development? A. To give every faculty member individual technical support is just not possible. Q. There aren't enough students with technical training to provide that support? A. That's why we're pushing the development of course components that are reusable and course-management systems that make it possible for technical-staff members to support most of the faculty. Faculty members have expectations of being able to operate independently, so there is also that tension for faculty members who need technical support. Q. Once faculty members get up and running with these components, aren't the courses that they create ones they can maintain on their own? A. That's the key to this. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

$250-million pledge to U. of Colorado is largest ever to a public university U. of Michigan signs lucrative apparel deal with Nike Education Dept. tightens financial screws on Computer Learning Centers Wilson Foundation announces plan to increase the value of the Ph.D. Has the first 150-year-old human already been born? The smart money says maybe so 3 scientists share Wolf prize in chemistry Education must "transform" itself or become irrelevant, Educause official says Teachers union urges colleges to adopt its distance-education standards